Plural low-temperature showcases such as freezing/refrigerating showcases or the like are installed in a store such as a supermarket or the like, and provided to display and sell foods while freezing or refrigerating the foods. In this case, an evaporator of each low-temperature showcase is circulatingly supplied with refrigerant from a refrigerating machine installed at the outside of the store (in a machine room or the like). In this case, there is a case where different marker's products are used as the low-temperature showcase and the refrigerating machine respectively to construct a refrigeration circuit of a cooling system in some stores.
From the viewpoint of approach to environment problems and reduction in energy cost, much attention has been recently paid to countermeasures to reduce power consumption in a cooling system even in stores such as supermarkets, etc. In order to reduce the power consumption, it is important to enhance the operation efficiency of the low-temperature showcases and the refrigerating machine themselves, but it is possible to reduce the power consumption on the assumption that respective devices constituting the cooling system are cooperated with one another on the whole in the overall cooling system containing the low-temperature showcases and the refrigerating machine.
Therefore, there has been recently developed a control apparatus provided with a database having plural registration places each of which is associated with each of different environmental conditions, each environmental condition comprising a store inside (in-store) temperature, a store outside (out-of-store) temperature and a time zone. Control data concerning a low-pressure side pressure set value for stopping a refrigerating machine has been learned and stored at each registration place every environmental condition to thereby construct the database. The control data are used directly or used with correction thereto by referring to control data at a registration place conformed with a present environmental condition and determination result data as to whether the cooling state of the low-temperature showcase at that time is good or not (for example, see Patent Document 1).
According to the control apparatus described above, it is possible to predict the shift of the operation environment and perform fine control while quickly following the predicted shift.